Archive for the ‘Willie Stargell’ Category

In 2011, fans of the Pittsburgh Pirates will ponder great distances. It’s been thirty-two years since Willie Stargell led the team to its last World Series championship, and except for a few years in the early 1990s almost all the seasons since Pops hung up his spikes have been dismal road signs marking the increasing distance from greatness. This 1981 Willie Stargell card, showing the lumbering 40-year-old pondering the ball he has just struck, presumably hoping it has enough distance to add another tally to a career home run total that by then virtually guaranteed the Pittsburgh slugger a plaque in the Hall of Fame. The best bet, judging from Stargell’s steeply declining power numbers (he hit just 11 home runs the previous season, the fewest since his rookie season, and in 1981 not a single one of his 66 plate appearances would end with a trot around the bases), is that the ball will fall short of the fence. But with Willie Stargell there’s always hope. You can’t hold a Willie Stargell card in your hands and not feel at least a flicker of possibilities. So I’m predicting that the 2011 Pittsburgh Pirates will once again cause their fans to ponder seemingly unbridgeable distances, but I also see a little yellow spark of hope.

Distance as it applies to the Pittsburgh Pirates is most generally felt in terms of time, that gaping span of years since greatness, but in the following excerpt from a 1999 AP article by Ted Anthony (who would, two year later, post a stirring elegy for Stargell), distance in terms of Willie Stargell and the Pittsburgh Pirates is felt in its primary sense. In 1979, Anthony was an 11-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates fanatic in the middle of a dream season for his team when he suddenly found himself on the other side of the globe from his team:

On Aug. 14, 1979, halfway through the baseball season, off we went to be among the first American families to be sent to China in decades. My linguist parents would be teaching in Beijing. . . .

October came, and I felt more distant than ever. The clippings trickled in, and I lovingly pasted each into a scrapbook. I look at it today, and the excitement still surges with each headline: “Stargell Belts HR in 11th As Bucs Top Reds in Opener.” “Pittsburgh Headed Toward First NL Pennant Since 1971.”

It seemed to unfold so quickly from there. Orioles win. Bucs win. Orioles win two more. Bucs even it up. Before I knew it, the Series was deadlocked 3-3, with the seventh game to be played in Baltimore. I was heartsick. The clippings were no longer enough.

I needed to hear it as it happened.

***

Sidney Rittenberg was a man with a history—a history I understood very little of back then. He had circulated in the inner sanctum of Chinese communist power for years—unheard of for an American. And, when things turned sour during the Cultural Revolution, he was imprisoned. I didn’t know then that he had recently been freed from a decade under arrest.

All I knew was that he was a nice older gentleman, a “China hand” whose family had three suites in our Friendship Hotel compound. His son, Li Xiaoming, half Chinese and half American, was my age—a good friend and a cool guy. He looked and spoke Chinese, but could also play a mean game of stickball. For the small group of American kids I hung with, he was a link between our world and the one that surrounded us.

I had been bellyaching about missing each Pirate postseason victory, and word filtered up to his dad, who sent a message back down the kid chain: Would I like to come over and listen to the game on shortwave, on U.S. Armed Forces Radio?

Because of the time difference—Beijing was 13 hours later than Baltimore—I arrived at their apartment just after 7 a.m., was let in and immediately given a cup of jasmine tea. A couple of my American friends, skipping school too, showed up minutes later. We were ushered into a living room, and in the corner sat a gray console about the size of a toaster oven—the most impressive shortwave I had ever seen, with a huge tuning dial. Mr. Rittenberg came out.

“Go ahead,” he told me, and I turned it on.

Together we trolled for the Armed Forces Radio frequency until the static melted into the familiar sound of a cheering crowd, half a planet away.

The voices weren’t my favorite Pittsburgh announcers, Milo Hamilton and Lanny Frattare, but it didn’t matter. This was The Game; I was connected. In a small apartment in a confusing country, I was suddenly able to touch a piece of home.

There it blurs. I remember the Orioles pulling ahead 1-0, but I don’t remember how. I remember sitting on my hands and wishing my eyes could complete the picture my ears were assembling. I remember thinking, as the game went into the sixth, that losing the series on one run would be devastating.

And, as the final innings crested to the Pirate championship that the boy who used to be me so coveted, I remember thinking this: Somewhere out there, there’s a home for me to go back to. It’s OK; it still exists.

If one’s employment experiences could be transposed into baseball card statistics, the back of my own card could serve as a polar opposite to the back of Willie Stargell’s. The roots of this difference (which would open into full bloom in the disparity between Stargell’s majestic numbers and the spotty data produced from my mostly half-assed participation in the American workforce) would be found in the litany of transience along the left-hand margin. On the back of this Willie Stargell card, on the left-hand margin, there is one word repeated again and again. Pirates. Willie Stargell signed with the Pirates in 1958, and he retired from baseball as a Pirate in 1982: 24 years with one organization. In my own 24 years of employment (I’m pretty sure I got my first job, stuffing inserts into a woodstove company newsletter, at age 15, and I’m 39 now), I’ve held 24 different jobs. A few of them lasted a day, many for a few months, some for a couple years, and one, my liquor store job, for a period of time that generally seemed no more substantial than a span of aimless weeks but which turned out to be the better part of a decade.

I’ve had a lot of people who were the boss of me, and I guess I’ve been fairly lucky, all in all. No tyrants, a few oddballs, the occasional would-be mentor. There was the ice cream store manager who played bass in a band that sounded, as he once told me while passing me a joint of his pot in the basement, “just like Grand Funk Railroad”; the college maintenance worker who I was assigned to as a helper whose motto for every task was “fuck it; good enough”; the leather store owner with a divot in his arm where a concentration camp tattoo had been who hired me to watch out for shoplifters and who told me, repeatedly, to “be a mensch.”

“You know what a mensch is?” this boss would ask. Oskar Adler was his name. His wife had been in the camps, too.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. You’ve already told me a million times, I’d think. I thought he had a bad memory.

I was bored out of my mind that summer, 19 years old, leaning on a broom for eight unending hours in the small, hot warehouse amid towering stacks of completely uninteresting cowhide. I ended up quitting before I’d said I was going to, making up some preposterous lie that I was needed early back at college, as if there was some emergency at my obscure state school that only I could solve. This left him short-handed for the last weeks of the summer. Fuck it, I was thinking. Good enough.

Oskar Adler didn’t complain. He even drove me home from the Spring Street warehouse to my Mom’s apartment in Brooklyn on my last day. Before I got out of the car he firmly shook my hand with his Nazi-surviving grip. He held the grip and looked me in the eye.

“Josh, be a mensch,” he said. “You know what a mensch is?”

“I know, I know.” He gave my hand one last squeeze.

“Be a mensch,” he said.

I really thought I knew what a mensch was, too. I mean, he had explained it to me a hundred times. But of course you can’t simply say you know what a mensch is. You have to be a mensch, which is not easy. You have to be solid, stable, reliable. A pillar for others, a constant in a changing world. Someone to lean on and to draw strength from.